2024 was not a good year. I wrote the preceding sentence and immediately thought to myself, “Have any of the recent years been good?” I doubt I’d describe them as such. But last year was a real doozy in terms of what was happening in the world. Also, it was a hard year for me personally because I was suffering from intense sleep deprivation. Here’s a post (originally written in April of last year) about what it was like.
I don’t sleep well or for long enough. I almost always go to bed later than I ought, because I’m a night owl by nature. It takes me about a half an hour to fall asleep. Staying asleep is a problem, too. Whether it’s because I’m too hot, too cold, something hurts, there’s the slightest noise, my mind won’t shut up, I’m thirsty, gotta pee, or all of the above, I rarely sleep all the way through morning.
Last night I turned off the light at 11:00, then woke up at about 4:40 and was still trying to fall back asleep at 5:40, considered getting up but decided it was better to at least rest, and was drifting in a half-conscious state when the alarm jarred me out of it at 6:20. So, I got about 5.25 hours of sleep plus maybe 40 minutes of semi-sleep, but I need at least 8 hours of actual sleep to feel human.
I hate being this tired. Words stop sounding like words and begin to lose meaning. I have no patience and become irrationally angry at the least provocation. My short-term memory doesn’t function. I’m so distractable that I even get distracted from my distractions. Driving is a nightmarish experience of having to be hypervigilant to compensate for the lack of natural alertness. I try to work, but my brain will not engage. If my mental sharpness were to be described in terms of a tack, it would be the tack that has somehow been completely flattened and is of no use to anyone anymore.
I will spend my evening watching TV, either something I’ve already seen or something so simplistic that it requires not the least bit of thought from me, because that’s all I can handle. I will fritter away hours because I’m incapable of harnessing them for anything useful. The only thing I do well when I’m tired is to dredge up words that I rarely use–a necessity when exhaustion-induced aphasia steals away the ones I’d typically use.